What Technology Wants (33 page)

For people who live off the grid, without TV, internet, or books beyond one Bible, the Amish are perplexingly well informed. There's not much I could tell them that they didn't know about and already have an opinion on. And surprisingly, there's not much new that at least one person in their church has not tried to use. In fact, the Amish rely on the enthusiasm of those early adopters to try stuff out until it proves harmful.

The typical adoption pattern for a new technology goes like this: Ivan is an Amish alpha geek. He is always the first to try a new gadget or technique. He gets in his head that the new flowbitzmodulator would be really useful. He comes up with a justification of how it fits into the Amish orientation. So he goes to his bishop with this proposal: “I'd like to try this out.” The bishop says to Ivan, “Okay, Ivan, do whatever you want with this. But you have to be ready to give it up if we decide it is not helping you or is hurting others.” So Ivan acquires the tech and ramps it up, while his neighbors, family, and bishops watch intently. They weigh the benefits and drawbacks. What is it doing to the community? To Ivan? Cell-phone use among the Amish began that way. According to anecdote, the first Amish alpha geeks to request permission to use cell phones were two ministers who were also contractors. The bishops were reluctant to give permission but suggested a compromise: Keep the cell phones in the vans of the drivers. The van would be a mobile phone shanty. Then the community would watch the contractors. It seemed to work, so other early adopters picked it up. But still, at any time, even years later, the bishops can say no.

I visited a shop that built the Amish's famous buggies. From the outside, the carts look simple and old-fashioned. But when I inspected the process in the shop, I could see that they are quite high-tech and surprisingly complicated rigs. Made of lightweight fiberglass, they are hand cast and outfitted with stainless steel hardware and cool LED lights. The owner's teenage son, David, also worked at the shop. Like a lot of Amish, who work alongside their parents from an early age, he was incredibly poised and mature. I asked him what he thought the Amish would do about cell phones. He snuck his hand into his overalls and pulled one out. “They'll probably accept them,” he said and smiled. He then quickly added that he worked for the local volunteer fire department, which was why he had one. (Sure!) But, his dad chimed in, if cell phones are accepted, “there won't be wires running down the street to our homes.”

In pursuit of their goal to remain off the grid yet modernize, some Amish have installed inverters on their diesel generators linked to batteries to provide them with 110 off-grid volts. They power specialty appliances at first, such as an electric coffeepot. I saw one home with an electric copier in the home office part of the living room. Will the slow acceptance of modern appliances creep along until, 100 years hence, the Amish have what we have now (but will by then have left behind)? What about cars? Will the Old Order ever drive old-fashioned internal combustion clunkers, say, when the rest of the world is using personal jet packs? Or will they embrace electric cars? I asked David, the 18-year-old Amish, what he expects to use in the future. Much to my surprise, he had a ready teenage answer. “If the bishops allow the church to leave behind buggies, I know exactly what I will get: a black Ford 460 V8.” That's a 500-horsepower muscle car. Some Mennonite orders permit generic cars if they are black—no chrome or fanciness. So a black hot rod is okay! His dad, the carriage maker, again chimed in, “Even if that happens, there will always be some horse-and-carriage Amish.”

David then admitted, “When I was deciding whether to join the church or not, I thought of my future children and whether they would be brought up without restrictions. I could not imagine it.” A common phrase among the Amish is “holding the line.” They all recognize the line keeps moving, but a line must remain.

The book
Living Without Electricity
charts out how many years later the Amish adopt a technology after it has been adopted by the rest of America. My impression is that the Amish are living about 50 years behind us. Half of the inventions they use now were invented within the last 100 years. They don't adopt everything new, but when they do embrace it, it's half a century after everyone else does. By that time, the benefits and costs are clear, the technology stable, and it is cheap. The Amish are steadily adopting technology—at their pace. They are slow geeks. As one Amish man said, “We don't want to stop progress, we just want to slow it down.” But their manner of slow adoption is instructive:

This method works for the Amish, but can it work for the rest of us? I don't know. It has not really been tried yet anywhere else. And if the Amish hackers and early adopters teach us anything, it's that you have to try things first. Their motto is “try first and relinquish later, if need be.” We are good at trying first, not good at relinquishing. To fulfill the Amish model we'd have to get better at relinquishing as a group—which is very difficult for a pluralistic society. Social relinquishing relies on mutual support. I have not seen any evidence of that happening outside of Amish communities, but it would be a telling sign if it did appear.

The Amish have become very good at managing technologies. But what do they gain by this discipline? Are their lives really any better for this effort? We can see what they give up, but have they earned anything we would want?

Recently an Amish guy rode his bicycle out to our home along the foggy coast of the Pacific, and I had a chance to ask this question in depth. He appeared at our door sweaty and out of breath from the long uphill climb to our house under the redwoods. Parked a few feet away was his ingenious Dahon fold-up bike, which he had pedaled from the train station. Like most Amish, he did not fly, so he had stored his bike on the three-day cross-country train ride from Pennsylvania. This was not his first trip to San Francisco. He had previously ridden his bike along the entire coast of California and had in fact seen a lot of the world by train, bike, and boat.

For the next week, our Amish visitor couch-surfed in our spare bedroom, and at dinner he regaled us with tales of his life growing up in a horse-and-buggy, Old Order, Plain Folk community. I'll call our friend Leon. He is an unusual Amish in many ways. I met Leon online. Online, is of course, the last place you'd ever expect to meet an Amish man. But Leon had read some things I had posted about the Amish on my website and wrote to me. While he never went to high school (Amish formal education ceases after eighth grade) he is among the few Plain Folk to go to college, where he is currently an older student. (He is in his 30s.) He hopes to study medicine and perhaps become the first Amish doctor. Many former Amish have gone on to college or become doctors, but none have done that while remaining in the Old Order church. Leon is unusual in that he is a Plain Folk church member yet relishes his ability to live in the “outside” world as well.

The Amish practice a remarkable tradition called
rumspringa,
wherein their teenagers are allowed to ditch their homemade uniforms—suspenders and hats for boys, long dresses and bonnets for girls—and don baggy pants and short skirts, buy a car, listen to music, and party for a few years before they decide to forever give up these modern amenities and join the Old Order church. This intimate, real exposure to the technological universe means that they are fully cognizant of what that world has to offer and what exactly they are denying themselves. Leon is on a sort of permanent
rumspringa
—although he doesn't party but works very hard. His father runs a machine shop (a common Amish occupation), so Leon is a genius with tools. I was in the middle of a bathroom plumbing job on the afternoon when Leon first showed up, and he quickly took over the chore. I was impressed by his complete mastery of hardware store parts. I've heard of Amish auto mechanics who don't drive cars but can fix any model you bring them.

As Leon spoke of what his boyhood was like with only a horse and buggy for transportation, and what he learned in his multigrade, one-room schoolhouse, a fervent wistfulness played over his face. He missed the comfort of Old Order life now that he was away from it. We outsiders think of life without electricity, central heat, or cars as hard punishment. But curiously, Amish life offers more leisure than contemporary urbanity does. In Leon's account, they always had time for a game of baseball, reading, visiting neighbors, and hobbies.

Many observers of the Amish have remarked on how hardworking they are. So it was a complete surprise to someone like Eric Brende, an MIT grad student who gave up an engineering degree and instead dropped out to live alongside an Old Order Amish/Mennonite community, to find out how much leisure this lifestyle generated. Brende, who is not Amish, eliminated as much gear as he could from his home with his wife and tried to live as Plain as possible, a tale he recounts in his book,
Better Off
. For over two years Brende gradually adopted what he calls a minimite lifestyle. A minimite uses “the least amount of technology needed to accomplish something.” Like his Old Order Amish/ Mennonite neighbors, he employed a minimum of technology: no power tools or electric appliances. Brende found that the absence of electronic entertainment, of long auto commutes, and of chores aimed at simply maintaining existing complex technology resulted in more time of real leisure. In fact, the constraints of cutting wood by hand, hauling manure with horses, and doing dishes by lamplight liberated the first genuine leisure time he had ever had. At the same time, the hard, strenuous manual work was satisfying and rewarding. He told me he found not only more leisure but more fulfillment as well.

Wendell Berry is a thinker and farmer who works his farm in an old-fashioned way using horses instead of tractors, very much like the Amish. Like Eric Brende, Berry finds tremendous satisfaction in the visible arrangement of bodily labor and agricultural results. Berry is a master wordsmith as well, and no one has been able to convey the “gift” that minimalism can deliver as well as he. One particular story from his collection
The Gift of Good Land
captures the almost ecstatic sense of fulfillment won with minimal technology.

Our Amish friend Leon spoke of the same equation: fewer distractions, more satisfaction. The ever-ready embrace of his community was palpable. Imagine it: Neighbors would pay your medical bill if needed, or build your house in a few weeks without pay, and, more important, allow you to do the same for them. Minimal technology, unburdened by cultural innovations such as insurance or credit cards, forces a daily reliance on neighbors and friends. Hospital stays are paid by church members, who also visit the sick regularly. Barns destroyed by fire or storm are rebuilt in a barn raising and not by insurance money. Financial, marital, and behavioral counseling are done by peers. The community is as self-reliant as it can make itself and only as self-reliant as it is because it is a community. I began to understand the strong attraction the Amish lifestyle exerts on its young adults and why, even today, only a very few leave after their
rumspringa
. Leon observed that of the 300 or so friends his age in his church, only 2 or 3 have abandoned this very technologically constrained life, and they joined a church slightly less strict but still not mainstream.

But the cost of this closeness and dependency is limited choice. No education beyond eighth grade. Few career options for guys, none besides homemaker for girls. For the Amish and minimites, one's fulfillment must blossom inside the traditional confines of a farmer, trades-man, or housewife. But not everyone is born to be a farmer. Not every human is ideally matched to the rhythms of horse and corn and seasons and the eternal close inspection of village conformity. Where in the Amish scheme of things is the support for a mathematical genius or a person who might spend all day composing new music?